ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, May 20, 1996 TAG: 9605200135
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DENNIS T. AVERY
IS IT possible that America has finally come up with a good farm policy after 60 years of surpluses and rural decline? Remarkably, it is.
The new U.S. farm bill won't pay farmers to waste as much cropland, will give them incentives to seek lucrative new export markets and should save taxpayers money over the long run.
As a result, farming may become America's biggest new high-tech growth industry, fueling a revival of jobs and real-estate values in rural communities. (The old policy of diverting cropland killed off one-third of the nonfarm jobs in rural America.)
America's huge tracts of prime farmland should play a bigger role in supplying the world's fast-rising food demand, helping to stave off the plow-down of millions of square miles of tropical forest in densely populated Asia.
The world will also get less of the clumsy government farm mismanagement that brought on this year's high grain prices.
(Both the United States and the European Union paid farmers not to grow food on substantial tracts of good land last year, even though world grain stocks were clearly tightening.)
The new farm bill is not perfect. It still hasn't killed off the expensive sugar subsidy. It also leaves the door open for farmers to raid the treasury again in seven years.
Its biggest flaw is that it will still take more than 20 million acres of pretty good U.S. farmland out of production under the misnamed Conservation Reserve.
But as the first major revision in U.S. farm policy since the Great Depression, it gets fairly high marks.
City folks have wondered for decades about the logic of wasting farmland amid rising world food demand.
Farmers claimed the world didn't have enough customers able to pay good prices. If that was true in 1933, it certainly hasn't been true in recent decades.
Consumers in India pay two or three times as much for milk and cooking oil as Americans. Philippine wheat and corn prices are double those on the world market. Food prices in Japan and South Korea are infamously high.
Farmers said the cropland diversion was helping conserve soil, but a change in tillage wiped out that excuse 20 years ago. Today, conservation tillage uses herbicides to control weeds, instead of ``bare-earth'' techniques like plowing, and thus cuts cropland erosion by 65 to 95 percent.
Much of today's set-aside land could be cropped safely and sustainably with conservation tillage. That's why the Conservation Reserve is a sham: It won't conserve much.
If the land in the Conservation Reserve is good enough for crops, we should crop that land instead of fragile tropical soils with three times the erosion potential.
If it's too poor for crops, it should be turned back into permanent wildlife habitat. Why is the government spending taxpayer dollars to keep it in grass-covered limbo? To make itself seem environmentally important?
The new trade-oriented U.S. farm policy couldn't come at a better time. The world's food demand is now accelerating at a pace never before seen.
Asia's incomes are soaring. The Chinese are eating an additional 4 million tons of meat each year, and China is already double-cropping its good land.
India wants an extra 2 million tons of milk per year, and Indonesia is expanding its poultry consumption at double-digit rates.
By 2030, nearly 4 billion Asians will be eating the way Japan already does, and Asia will have nine times as many people per acre of farmland as North America.
Despite this burgeoning demand, American farmers have been clinging to their subsidies instead of supporting liberalized farm trade rules under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade - even though the United States is the world's low-cost supplier and America has had ``farm surpluses!''
Fortunately, the new farm bill makes it absolutely clear that any future gains in farm income will have to come from selling more products overseas.
The American farmer will thus develop a new enthusiasm for free trade that will help the whole world use its scarce farming resources more effectively.
Recent studies estimate that the cropland set-aside policy has cost rural communities one-third of their nonfarm jobs. The new bill should mean more good-paying jobs both on and off our farms, and fewer boarded-up stores on rural Main Streets.
With all of this growing export demand, what will keep American consumers from getting gouged by high grain prices again in future years? Competition.
The problem this year is that the world's livestock and poultry industries had gotten used to the governments of the United States and Western Europe holding millions of tons of surplus grain.
In 1995, the governments were facing budget deficits, so they didn't store grain - but they still diverted cropland.
The United States paid to keep more than 30 million acres of pretty good cropland out of production. Western Europe foolishly pushed millions of acres into a silly ``biofuels'' program to make expensive diesel oil out of rapeseed.
This winter's high grain prices have already taught the world's livestock and poultry industries that they'll have to hold their own grain stocks - and pay our farmers a competitive price to grow the grain.
Dennis T. Avery, of Churchville, is editor of the Global Food Quarterly, author of ``Saving the Planet With Pesticides and Plastic'' and was formerly the State Department's senior agricultural analyst.
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